Religious and Spiritual Movements and the Visual Arts – Page 2

Zbigniew Makowski

ZBIGNIEW MAKOWSKI TIMELINE

1930 (January 31): Zbigniew Makowski was born in Warsaw, Poland.

1950: Makowski was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

1956: Makowski obtained his diploma after working in the workshop of K. Tomorowicz in Warsaw.

1957: The first individual exhibition of the artist took place in the student club Hybrids in Warsaw.

1958/1959: Makowski created his first illuminated book, which opened a series of over two hundred works of this kind. In order to produce it, he worked on a book by Theosophist Annie Besant, writing and painting on a copy of it.

1962: Makowski travelled to Paris, where he met André Breton and became involved with the artistic movement Phases.

1965/1966: Makowski worked as a lecturer in the National Higher School of Fine Arts (from 1996 called University of Fine Arts) in Poznań, Poland.

1973: Makowski received the prestigious Polish Art Critique’s Prize.

1982–1988: Makowski took a break from artistic exhibitions.

1991: The artist’s painting Mirabilitas secundum diversos modos exire potest a rebus (painted between 1973–1980) was presented by the Polish Government to the Office of the United Nations in Geneva.

1992: Makowski received the prestigious Polish Jan Cybis Award for lifetime achievement.

1995: The so called “Blue Exhibition” of the painter, organized for the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, took place in the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw.

2010: Makowski received the Special Prize of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

2010-2019: Makowski continued to live and work in Warsaw

2019 (August 19): Zbigniew Makowski died.

BIOGRAPHY

Zbigniew Makowski is one of the most important Polish contemporary artists. His art includes both paintings and illuminated books. Art critics called his work “metaphorical painting” or “romantic geometry,” because of the forms he uses in his paintings, consisting of geometric figures and fantastic backgrounds with surrealistic elements, which create mysterious, dreamy visions. Makowski’s works are also often called treatises rather than paintings, because the author fills them with words or lines of small letters in many different shapes, reminiscent of graphics in alchemical treatises. His art includes continuous references to the whole tradition of Western esotericism. There is a certain emphasis on Theosophy, but Makowski is influenced by a large multiplicity of esoteric sources.

Zbigniew Makowski was born in 1930 in Warsaw, Poland. From 1950to 1956, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He obtained a diploma by studying in the workshop of Kazimierz Tomorowicz (1897–1961), a landscape painter and a representative of Polish Formism, an avant-garde artistic current emphasizing form over content. Makowski debuted as an artist in the mid-1950s. The political situation in Poland after World War II and the emerging communist regime had an impact on the development of his art. Makowski did not follow the trends officially imposed by the regime, and from the very beginning of his career started looking for non-conventional forms of expression.

He became a member of an international movement known as Phases, which was born in the early 1950s in France. Phases was established by the French poet and critic Édouard Jaguer (1924–2006), not as a group but as an informal collaborative enterprise of artists engaged in different projects. Phases never published a manifesto, but the common denominator of his artists was the importance it attributed to imagination (Dąbkowska-Zydroń 1994:9–15, 118–20). Makowski was involved with this movement from 1962 on. He first encountered Phases during a trip to Paris, and later he repeatedly exhibited his works together with other artists involved with the movement. In Paris, Makowski also met the father of Surrealism, André Breton (1896–1966), whose artistic explorations became an important source of inspiration for him (Szafkowska 2015:11-16).

In the initial period of his artistic work (1965–1960), Makowski was strongly influenced by expressionism and existentialism. At that time, he was mostly creating realistic works: still lives, landscapes, and portraits. However, he quickly started to move towards Surrealism and Informalism. In the early 1960s, his art could be characterized as structural abstraction, with the use of simple, and often geometric, shapes in shades of black, white, and grey. In the first half of the 1960s his works were filled with lines (horizontal, vertical, sometimes circular or parabolic), painted across signs and symbols, letters, or whole sentences (Sowińska 1980:2–5). [Image at right] At this time, the artist was mostly known for his calligraphic compositions, which he himself called “letters written to unknown addressees” (Makowski 1965:8).

In the mid-1960s, signs and symbols, becoming over time more and more numerous and varied, were placed in landscape backgrounds divided into the two spheres of earth and air. In this scenery, Makowski placed his favorite keys, ladders, stairs, geometrical forms, letters, ciphers, citations, and labyrinths. These elements were realistically painted but did not serve a descriptive function, Rather, they became symbols with a secret meanings, within the framework of a specific artistic and esoteric language that Makowski used but did not explain to his audiences. It is this language that critics nicknamed “romantic geometry.” In the second part of the 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s, the painter abandoned this style, but came back to it in the 1980s (Sowińska 1980:2–5).

Makowski was awarded many prestigious Polish prizes, among others the Cyprian Kamil Norwid Prize of Art Critique in 1973, the Jan Cybis Award in 1992, and the Special Prize of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in 2010 (Szafkowska 2015:11–16). One of Makowski’s paintings, Mirabilitas secundum diversos modos exire potest a rebus, (painted between 1973 and 1980) was presented as a gift from the Polish Government to the Office of the United Nations in Geneva. Works of Makowski are present in the most important museums in Poland, with a large collection is in the National Museum in Wroclaw, and around the world, including in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Throughout his long career, the artist took part in over two hundred collective exhibitions and around one hundred personal ones (Szafkowska 2015:11–16).

Makowski is an erudite painter, inspired not only by the history of art, but also by literature, philosophy, and the traditions of cultures and religions around the world. Using those inspirations, he created an original mythology based on his own experiences, feelings, and thoughts. He tried to affect not only the aesthetic sense of his audience, but also their emotions, their mind, and their subconscious, converting his works of art into multidimensional spiritual experiences (Nastulanka 1978:6). The surfaces of his paintings are reminiscent of multicolored carpets or richly ornated collages, with a baroque sense of horror vacui (Szafkowska 2015:11–16).

Makowski is also known for creating artistic works that can be called “illuminated books” in the tradition of William Blake (1757-1827). Makowski created over two hundred works of this kind (Szafkowska 2015:11), experimenting with the very form and function of books. The illuminated books are a key to understanding his paintings, and often serve as the basis for future compositions. The books themselves are recreated many times: the artist includes paintings and drawings in them with pencil, ink, gouache, or watercolor, cuts or stitches them, adds his notes, citations, and poetry. They become a kind of magical grimoires, written with an encrypted language, whose multiplicity of meaning cannot be easily discovered by the uninitiated (Bartnik 2008:7–16). The basis for the first “illuminated book” was one of the works of Annie Besant (1847–1933), the second president of the Theosophical Society. The painter started from a printed book and wrote and painted on it. However, Makowski sometimes created his own books from the beginning, using handmade paper and illustrating every single page (Szafkowska 2015:15).

Makowski combines writing and drawing, multiplying the meanings of his works and making them somewhat hermetic and hard toread. The presence of writing constitutes the original character of Makowski’s paintings. [Image at right] The artist often uses not only his own notes, but also sentences in various languages, among others ancient Greek and Latin, citations from classics of literature, poetry, and so on. There is a characteristic motif of a spiral inscription that appears in several of his works and resembles a mandala. Sometimes, Makowski encrypts his notes; some of them can be read only in a mirror, others are deliberately partly erased (Bartnik 2008:8). One of the inspirations for this “Lettrism” were the works of Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (1240–91), one of the leading Kabbalists of the Middle Ages, as well as those of an Italian priest, mystic and cartographer of the fourteenth century, Opicinus de Canistris (1296–c.1353), also known as the Anonymous Ticinensis, the creator of the so called anthropomorphic maps (Baranowa 2011:72–79).

Beyond these references, however, we find in Makowski’s work a great variety of symbols, coming from both Western and Eastern esoteric traditions. [Image at right] His favorite motifs are keys, black birds,labyrinths, stairs, ladders, bevels, gates and portals, spirals, cups, swords, Platonic solids, Tarot cards placed on an oneiric background. [Image at right] A motif he often uses is a female portrait (a contemporary woman but also a goddess, a Renaissance lady, or a medieval Madonna), appearing where we would not expect it. Nothing is what it seems at first sight to be. Ostensibly realistic elements become archetypical forms, creating “mystical rebuses” (Szafkowska 2015:11–16).

Multiple Western esoteric traditions are present in many of Makowski’s paintings and illuminated books. The esoteric reference is not only apparent in the works themselves, but is also explicitly mentioned in the painter’s notes and memoirs. For instance, Makowski mentions his return to Warsaw in 1945, a city in ruin right after the war. He was fifteen, and along with his colored reproductions of paintings by Joseph M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and the Pre-Raphaelites, and his own drawings, he brought with him books by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the founder of Anthroposophy, and by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), the co-founder of the Theosophical Society. In his Autobiography, Makowski mentions his interest in the Austrian esoteric novelist, Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932), and in Polish messianic philosophers. He took a special interest in the ideas of one of the latter, Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (1776–1853), although he was not fully convinced by them. He also read the Polish Hegelian philosopher, August Cieszkowski (1814–1894), and delighted in the works of one of the most important Polish Romantic poets, Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849), himself not foreign to esotericism. Among his acknowledged inspirations, he mentions also Theosophical books such as The Great Initiates, by French Theosophist Édouard Schuré (1841–1929), and The Book of the Living God, by German writer and painter Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, known as Bô Yin Râ (18761–943) (Makowski 1978:79–90).

Other sources important for Makowski were the classic authors of Western esotericism: Paracelsus (1493–1541), Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875) (Bartnik 2008:7–11), and William Blake (Szafkowska 2015:11). Like other artists interested in esotericism, Makowski was also influenced by the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) (Makowski 2007:66). In addition to Hermeticism, and ancient mysteries, the artist is also a devoted student of Kabbalah, particularly as interpreted by Christian philosophers such as Ramon Llull (ca. 1232–ca. 1315) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). Of Bruno, who was burned at stake in Rome in 1600 by the Catholic Church for his unorthodox, esoteric ideas, Makowski wrote: “I owe it to him that I live, and that I have the courage to think” (Makowski 1978:60).

Makowski repeatedly quoted Llull’s treatise Ars Magna (ca. 1305), a part of his philosophical work Ars generalis ultima, and also mentioned the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1467), an enigmatic fifteenth century Italian esoteric work probably written by Francesco Colonna (c.1433–1527). Ultimately, however, it would be impossible to list all of Makowski’s esoteric inspirations, just as it would be impossible to ascribe him to any specific esoteric movement or current (Janicka 1973:226). Makowski continued to lead his artistic workshop in Warsaw until his death in 2019. His work remains a testimony to the widespread influence of Western esotericism on twentieth and twenty-first century art.

IMAGES**
**All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Zbigniew Makowski, photo by Mirosław R. Makowski, c. 1974 (in the background: a self-portrait based on a photograph from the artist’s childhood).
Image #2: Zbigniew Makowski, Które były krajobrazy ostateczne [Those that were final landscapes] (1963). Courtesy of Agra-Art Auction House, Warsaw, Poland.
Image #3: Zbigniew Makowski, Labyrinth (1963–1972). Courtesy of Agra-Art Auction House, Warsaw, Poland.
Image #4: Zbigniew Makowski, Mirabilita (1995). Courtesy of Agra-Art Auction House, Warsaw, Poland.

REFERENCES

Baranowa, Anna. 2012. “Zbigniew Makowski.” Pp. 28–34 in Arttak – Sztuki Piekne, no. 3

Baranowa, Anna. 2011.“Ars Magna.” Pp. 73–79 in Dekada Literacka, no. 516.

Bartnik, Krystyna. 2008. Zbigniew Makowski. Wrocław: Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu.

Dąbkowska-Zydroń, Jolanta. 1994. Surrealizm po surrealizmie. Międzynarodowy Ruch „PHASES.” Warszawa: Instytut Kultury.

Hermansdorfer, Mariusz. 1995. “Sztuka Zbigniewa Makowskiego.” Pp. 4–7 in the catalogue Błękitna Wystawa. Warszawa: Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Zachęta.

Janicka, Krystyna. 1973. Surrealizm. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Filmowe i Artystyczne.

Kuczyńska, Agnieszka and Krzysztof Cichoń. 2008. Wąski Dunaj No 5. Ze Zbigniewem Makowskim rozmawiają Agnieszka Kuczyńska i Krzysztof Cichoń. Łódź: Atlas Sztuki.

Makowski, Zbigniew. 1978. “Autobiografia (fragmenty).” Pp. 79–90 in Zbigniew Makowski (Katalog wystawy). Wrocław: Muzeum Narodowe, and Łódź: Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych.

Makowski, Zbigniew. 1965. “Artysta o sobie.” P. 8 in Współczesność, no. 9.

Makowski, Zbigniew. n.d. “Korespondencja z Jackiem Waltosiem na temat ‘Wesela’ Stanisława Wyspiańskiego.” Pp. 66–68 in Zeszyty naukowo-artystyczne Wydziału Malarstwa Akademii Sztuk Pieknych w Krakowie, no. 8.

Nastulanka, Krystyna. 1978. “Gdzie czekają niespodzianki. Rozmowa ze Zbigniewem Makowskim.” Pp. 8 in Polityka, no. 51.

Sowińska, Teresa. 1980. “Wyobraźnia bez granic.” Pp. 2–5 in Zbigniew Makowski. Zeichnungen, Gouchen und Aquarelle. Berlin: Ośrodek Informacji i Kultury Polskiej Leipzig.

Szafkowska, Magdalena. 2015. “Księgi artystyczne Zbigniewa Makowskiego.” Pp. 11–16 in Polia 10.VI.1946, edited by M. Szafkowska. Wrocław: Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu.

Zbigniew Makowski’s works in NYC Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Accessed from https://www.moma.org/artists/3706?locale=en&page=1&direction = on 20 February 2017.

Post Date:
20 February 2017

Kazimierz Stabrowski

KAZIMIERZ STABROWSKI TIMELINE

1869 (November 29): Kazimierz Stabrowski was born in Kruplany (Russian Empire, formerly Poland, present-day Belarus).

1887: Stabrowski was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.

1892: While preparing for his diploma in painting, Stabrowski travelled for a few months to Greece and the Middle East.

1894: Stabrowski travelled to Germany. He completed the painting Mohammed in the Desert, also known as Escape from Mecca, for which he was awarded the Great Gold Medal by the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. He started studying under I.J. Riepin.

1897: Stabrowski went to Paris, where he studied painting in the Académie Julian under J.-J. Benjamin-Constant and J.-P. Laurens.

1890: Stabrowski returned to St. Petersburg.

c. 1900: Stabrowski wrote his short story, Legend.

1902 (September 15): Stabrowski married Julia Janiszewska. They moved to Warsaw, where the painter joined the Polish Artists’ Society “Art” [Sztuka] and started preparing for establishing a School of Fine Arts.

1904 (March 17): The Warsaw School of Fine Arts was established. Stabrowski became its director and one of its professors. In the same year, Lithuanian painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis joined the Academy. The show Lilla Weneda, with Stabrowski’s scenography, debuted at The City Theater in Kraków.

1905: Stabrowski became a member of the Theosophical circle in Warsaw that later evolved into the “Alba” lodge, of which he became the Secretary.

1908: “The Young Art” ball took place (organized annually since then) and became a source of inspiration for a series of esoterically inspired paintings by Stabrowski, including In Front of Stained Glass – A Peacock , The Princess of the Magic Crystal, and The Story of the Waves.

1909: Stabrowski was involved in a conflict with one of the School committee members, because both of financial problems of the institution and his involvement in the occult. As a consequence, he resigned from his position as director. Roughly at the same time, he became one of the founding members of the Warsaw Theosophical Society. Around this time, he also painted Vision I–III (Sketches for Annunciation).

1912: The Warsaw Theosophical Society, of which Stabrowski was the head, was registered in April.

1913: Stabrowski took part in the European Theosophical Conference in Stockholm, where he also exhibited his paintings. After the Conference, he went to Berlin and left his works in care of the family of Rudolph Steiner, so that the founder of the Anthroposophical Society and German artists could see them.

1915: During World War I, Stabrowski moved to St. Petersburg. He organized a large exhibition of his works there.

1916: Stabrowski collaborated in several artistic events held in Moscow.

1918: Stabrowski and his wife moved back again to Warsaw, due to the political situation in Russia. He established the artistic association “Sursum Corda” and organized an important exhibition in Warsaw.

1920: Stabrowski took part in organizing the Polish Theosophical Society. In this year, he painted The Consoler of Monsters and Angel and Monsters.

1924: Stabrowski became a member of a Polish Anthroposophical group that started to form in this time (the Polish Anthroposophical Society would be established officially only in the year the painter died). He painted Fantastic Composition.

1927: Stabrowski celebrated a jubilee for his 40 years of artistic work. Four exhibitions celebrated the event.

1929 (June 8): Stabrowski died in Garwolin, near Warsaw, Poland.

BIOGRAPHY

Kazimierz Stabrowski was a celebrated Polish painter, and the founder and first director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. [Image at right] He was also a very important figure in the Polish esoteric milieu: he was the first secretary of a registered Theosophical group in Poland, a founding member of the Polish Theosophical Society, and later a co-founder of the Anthroposophical Society in Poland in the 1920s. His esoteric interests reflect in some of his paintings. He is well-known as an artist for his dreamy landscapes, but even more for his symbolic, fantastic, and mystical compositions.

Stabrowski was born on November 29, 1869 in Kruplany, a village near Nowogródek that was then in the Russian Empire, although it was earlier part of Poland and is located in present-day Belarus. Stabrowski’s parents Antoni and Zofia (née Pilecka) belonged to a family of Polish landed gentry. Stabrowski’s early education took place in the Real School in Białystok, which he attended from 1880 to 1886. In 1887, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg (Skalska-Miecik 2002:275).

During his studies in the Academy, he travelled to several countries to improve his working skills. In 1892, he went via Odessa, Constantinople, Athens, Rhodes, Smyrna, Beirut, and Jaffa to Palestine (Jerusalem), where he took part in a Catholic retreat and received his confirmation, before traveling further to Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo. Two years later, he went to Germany and spent a few months there. He was regarded as a very talented student, who won several prizes in St. Petersburg for his painting: a Small and a Great Silver Medals in 1892, another Great Silver Medal in 1893, and a Great Golden Medal in 1894, when he received his diploma. He obtained a Master’s Degree with a painting entitled Mohammed in the Desert (known also as Escape from Mecca). In this work his religious and metaphysical interests, which would shape his later career, were already present.

His life-long passion for travels supplied him with inspiration and fueled his interest in the mystic East. From the time of his early art studies, he was also interested in Theosophy, that he had encountered in the esoteric milieus of St. Petersburg. After getting his diploma, Stabrowski studied one year in the workshop of renowned Russian realist painter Ilja Repin (1844–1930), under whose influence he remained for a long time.

In 1897, Stabrowski went to Paris to continue his studies in painting at the famous Académie Julian. His main teachers there were Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845-1903), a French painter well-known for his Orientalist taste, and the academic painter and sculptor Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921). After one year, he came back to St. Petersburg. In this time, besides painting, Stabrowski started to make a name for himself as an art critic and writer. He published several art-related notes and essays in Russian newspapers, and also wrote (but did not publish) a short story, Legend (Stabrowski c.1895-1905).

Some Polish art historians (e.g. Skalska 2002:275) claimed that, after Stabrowski left Riepin’s workshop and went to Paris, he spent a year in Munich where he studied under the Greek painter Nikolaos Gyzis (1842-1901). If confirmed, the detail would be relevant, as Gyzis was himself deeply interested in mysticism and esotericism. However, based on our own research, documents at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Munich show that, at that time, a Polish student named Stabrowski did study under Gyzis, but his first name was Edmond, not Kazimierz, he was born in Warsaw and was twenty, while our Stabrowski was born in Kruplany and was twenty-six.

In 1902, Stabrowski married Julia Janiszewska (1869-1941), herself an artist, who had completed her studies in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. After the marriage, they moved to Warsaw, where the painter became a member of the Polish Artists’ Society “Sztuka” (Art). He started to organize an artistic academy thanks to the support of his Russian connections, including the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich (1857–1905). With the permission of the Governor General, the Warsaw School of Fine Arts was officially opened on March 17, 1904. It is the ancestor of present-day Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Stabrowski became its first director, and one of the first teachers, along with such well-known Polish artists as Xavery Dunikowski (1875–1964), Ferdynand Ruszczyc (1870–1936), Konrad Krzyżanowski (1872–1922), and Karol Tichy (1871–1939).

In this time, Stabrowski’s esoteric interests also flourished. He became a member of the first Polish Theosophical circle. Later, this informal circle became the Alba Lodge, placed under the jurisdiction of the Russian Theosophical Society and named after the leading Russian Theosophist, Anna “Alba” Kamenskaya (1867–1952 ). Stabrowski became its Secretary. We do not know exactly at what date Stabrowski first joined the Theosophical Society. We do know, however, that he was officially a member of the Theosophical Society in England in the first years of the twentieth century and that, after the Russian branch of the Theosophical Society was officially established in 1908 (incorporated on September 30 and registered on November 17), he was transferred to the Russian Section on December 18, 1908.

In 1904, Stabrowski’s Warsaw School of Fine Arts enrolled as a student Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), a Lithuanian composer, who later also gained international fame as a painter. Čiurlionis was twenty-nine at this time, which made him one of the School’s oldest students, and he befriended some of his teachers (Žukienė 2015:12). At the time of his studies and friendship with Stabrowski, the Lithuanian artist also developed his interests in Theosophy (Hess and Dulska 2017). Although Čiurlionis died young (at age thirty-six), and never joined the Theosophical Society, a number of allusions to Theosophy are recognizable in his works (Introvigne 2013).

Stabrowski was active in the esoteric milieu in Warsaw, which included well-known writers, painters, and other members of the cultural elite of the time. He organized the so called “wild strawberry tea” meetings, where occult phenomena as well as Theosophical and Kabbalistic ideas were debated (Mažrimienė 2015:45-46). Spiritualist séances were also held there. They were attended by such prominent figures as the Polish poet and playwright Tadeusz Miciński (1873–1918) and the above mentioned Čiurlionis, who sometimes also played the role of a medium (Hass 1984:90), Zenon Przesmycki (1861–1944), the editor of the journal Chimera, Artur Górski (1870–1959), whose series of articles titled “Young Poland” gave the name to an important current in Polish visual arts, Bolesław Leśmian (1877–1937), a renowned poet, and others (Siedlecka 1996:63). Stabrowski was also a regular guest at similar meetings that were held in the home of poet Edward Słoński (1872–1926) and featured the famous Polish Spiritualist medium, Jan Guzik (1875-1928).

Polish artists interested in Theosophy also cooperated in various ventures. Stabrowski prepared Theosophically-inspired covers and illustrations for books written by other Polish members of the Theosophical Society, such as Tadeusz Miciński’s Nietota: The Book of Tatra Mystery and the works of Hanna Krzemieniecka (pen name of Janina Furs-Żyrkiewicz, 1866-1930), Fate and And when He Leaves into the Eternal Abyss… A Romance beyond the Grave. The Theosophical circle of Stabrowski in the first decade of the twentieth century seems to have been strongly influenced by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the leader of the German branch of the Theosophical Society who later founded Anthroposophy. Like Steiner, Stabrowski and his friends emphasized both Theosophical Eastern ideas and the esoteric dimensions of Christianity.

In 1908, the Warsaw Philharmonic hosted a memorable “Young Art” ball,organized by the Warsaw School of Fine Arts (Sieradzka 1980:187). The Academy held numerous artistic events, but the balls became an annual tradition of the school for many years, as documented by Stabrowski’s portraits of several participants in these events. These paintings, however, are not just portraits, but fantastic and symbolic interpretations of female beauty, inspired by Theosophical thought. Among them were In Front of Stained Glass – A Peacock, [Image at right] The Princess of the Magic Crystal, and The Story of the Waves.

The career of Stabrowski as director of the Warsaw School of Fine Arts came to an end in 1909, when he resigned after having been involved in a conflict with one of the school committee members. He was accused of poor management (because of financial problems of the Academy), but also criticized for his involvement in the occult and for having invited students to Spiritualist séances. Stabrowski wrote a response to the accusations, but resigned anyway.

The Polish members of the Theosophical Society were very keen on having their own branch, one that would not be directly connected to the Russian Theosophical Society. It was a political statement, implicitly criticizing Russian occupation of Poland. A letter survives, which Stabrowski sent in 1910 to the Theosophical Society’s headquarters in Adyar seeking an independent status for the Polish branch (Stabrowski 1910), but his efforts were initially unsuccessful. Only in April 1912, the Alba lodge was reconstituted as separated from the Russian section, and registered as the Warsaw Theosophical Society, with its statutes ratified by the Governor General (Bocheński n.d.; Karas 1958).

In 1913, Stabrowski took part in the European Conference of the National Sections of the Theosophical Society held in Stockholm, where he also exhibited his paintings. After the conference, he went to Berlin and left most of his works exhibited in Stockholm in care of the family of Rudolph Steiner (Skalska-Miecik 2002:276). Kalinowski claims that Stabrowski was on his way to Italy via Berlin when he met Steiner, and was asked by him to leave the paintings in Germany so that, after the Theosophists in Stockholm, artists in Berlin might see them too. Unfortunately, after Steiner’s death, those paintings were lost (Kalinowski 1927:7). Some other works, which revealed Stabrowski’s esoteric interests, but of which only the titles remain, were: Radiant [Promienisty], Larvae [Larwy], On the edge of the invisible [Na granicy niewidzialnego], In the Astral [W astralu], and others (Makowska 1986:332). Alojzy Gleic claimed that Stabrowski later also became interested in Rosicrucianism, astrology, and Kabbalah (Glejc 1936:75).

During World War I, in 1915, Stabrowski and his wife moved to St. Petersburg.He organized a large exhibition of his works there and travelled to several countries. He also took part in the Russian cultural life, not only in St. Petersburg but also in Moscow. After three years, the Stabrowskis moved back to Warsaw, due to the political situation prevailing in Russia. At this time, many of his paintings were damaged or lost. When in Poland, his interest in mysticism led Stabrowski to establish an ephemeral group, “Sursum Corda,” in 1922 (Morawińska 1997:210)

In 1920, now in independent Poland, Stabrowski took part in the forming of the Polish Theosophical Society (Skalska-Miecik 2002:276). The organization was registered legally in the country in 1921, and became an official national section of the Theosophical Society, Adyar in 1923, with Wanda Dynowska (1888–1971) as its Secretary General (Hess 2015:65-66). In this period, Stabrowski painted The Consoler of Monsters, [Image at right] Angel and Monsters, and Fantastic Composition. Those paintings are also considered as inspired by Theosophy (Hess and Dulska 2017).

Since Stabrowski had always been an admirer of Rudolph Steiner, both during the latter’s career in the Theosophical Society and thereafter, it is not surprising that in 1924 the painter became a member of a Polish Anthroposophical group that started to form in this time. However, the Polish Anthroposophical Society was established officially only in the year of Stabrowski’s death.

In his last years, Stabrowski was recognized as one of Poland’s leading painters, and continued his travels to a number of countries. In 1927, he celebrated his jubilee for forty years of artistic work. On the occasion, four exhibitions were organized: in Poznań, Łódź, Bydgoszcz, and Warsaw. [Image at right] Stabrowski died in Garwolin near Warsaw, on June 8, 1929, at age sixty. According to his family, his death occurred in somewhat mysterious circumstances (Skalska-Miecik 2002:277). He is regarded as a leading exponent of Polish symbolism, although the category of symbolism in general is now increasingly controversial and has been deconstructed by some critics. The important influence of Theosophy and, later, Anthroposophy in his work is increasingly recognized by historians, and Stabrowski also played a crucial role in introducing other artists and poets to Theosophical ideas.

IMAGES**
**All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Portrait of Kazimier Strabrowski.
Image #2: Stabrowski painting: In Front of Stained Glass.
Image #3: Stabrowski painting: The Consoler of Monsters.
Image #4: Strabrowsk in 1927 at the exhibition in Poznan.

REFERENCES

Bocheński, Władysław. n.d. Moje wspomnienia z okresu należenia do Polskiego Towarzystwa Teozoficznego w latach 1922–1939 . Archival document from Archiwum Nauki PAN i PAU w Krakowie. Kazimierz Tokarski 1930–2007, KIII-180: 16 and 20.

Glejc, Alojzy Krzysztof. 1939. Glossariusz okultyzmu. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Wawelskie.

Hass, Ludwik. 1984. Ambicje, rachuby, rzeczywistość. Wolnomularstwo w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej 1905-1928. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

Hess, Karolina Maria. 2015. “The Beginnings of Theosophy in Poland: From Early Visions to the Polish Theosophical Society.” Pp. 53–71 in The Polish Journal of the Arts and Culture, no. 13.

Hess, Karolina Maria and Małgorzata Alicja Dulska. 2017. “Kazimierz Stabrowski’s Esoteric Dimensions: Theosophy, Art, and the Vision of Femininity.” La Rosa di Paracelso, issue The Eternal Esoteric Feminine [forthcoming].

Introvigne, Massimo. 2013. Čiurlionis’ Theosophy: Myth or Reality? Paper presented at the conference Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy and the Arts in the Modern World, Amsterdam, September 26, 2013.

Kalinowski, Kazimierz . 1927. K. Stabrowski. Sylwetka malarza-poety. Poznań: Wielkopolski Związek Artystów Plastyków.

Karas, Evelyn. 1958. The Theosophical Society and Theosophy in Poland . A talk given at the School of Wisdom, Aydar, March 1958. Archival document from Archiwum Nauki PAN i PAU w Krakowie, Kazimierz Tokarski 1930–2007, KIII-180: 20.

Lilla Weneda. 1904. Poster, 23 May 1904. Kraków: Dyrekcja Teatru Miejskiego.

Makowska, Urszula. 1986. “Wiedza tajemna Wschodu. Tendencje okultystyczne w kulturze polskiej na przełomie XIX i XX wieku.” Pp 323–38 in Orient i orientalizm w sztuce . Materiały Sesji Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki, Kraków, grudzień 1983. Warsaw: Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

Morawińska, Agnieszka. 1997. Symbolizm w malarstwie polskim 1890-1914. Warsaw: Arkady.

Piwocki, Ksawery. 1965. Historia Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie 1904-1964. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.

Siedlecka, Jadwiga. 1996. Mikołaj Konstatnty Ciurlionis 1875-1911. Preludium warszawskie. Warsaw: AgArt.

Sieradzka, Anna. 1980. “’Bal Młodej Sztuki’ w 1908 roku i jego reminiscencje plastyczne i literackie.” Pp. 187–98 in Biuletyn Historii Sztuki , no. 42.

Skalska, Lija. 1975. “Kazimierz Stabrowski – lata studiów i początki działalności twórczej.” Pp. 575–657 in Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, vol.. 19.

Skalska-Miecik, Lija. 1984. “Echa sztuki rosyjsiej w twórczości warszawskich modernistów.” Pp. 125–72 in Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie, no. 28.

Skalska-Miecik, Lija. 2002. “Kazimierz Stabrowski.” Pp. 275–78 in Polski Słownik Biograficzny, vol. 41.

Stabrowski, Kazimierz. 1910. Letter. Archival material in Archiwum Nauki PAN i PAU w Krakowie, Kazimierz Tokarski 1930-2007, KIII-180:19.

Stabrowski Kazimierz. c.1895-1905. Legenda [unpublished]. Manuscript in the Biblioteka Narodowa. Warsaw.

Žukienė, Rasa. 2015. “Shades of Lithuania in the work of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.” Pp. 8–35 in M. K. Čiurlionis. Litewska opowieść. Krakow: International Cultural Centre, and Kaunas: M.K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art.

Post Date:
9 February 2017

Pieter Cornelis “Piet” Mondrian

PIETER MONDRIAN TIMELINE

1872 (March 7): Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (he would change his last name into “Mondrian” in 1911 ) was born in Amersfoort, The Netherlands.

1892: Mondrian was admitted to the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts.

1894: Mondrian’s fellow student at the Academy and friend, architect Karel de Bazel, joined the Theosophical Society.

1900: Mondrian went through a religious crisis and abandoned the Calvinist faith of his family. He also read The Great Initiates by French Theosophist Éd ouard Schuré.

1901: Mondrian painted The Passion Flower, a work in which some critics see religious influences.

1908: Mondrian painted Devotion, a work he explicitly connected to Theosophy in his notebooks.

1909 (May 14): Mondrian formally joined the Theosophical Society.

1911: Mondrian completed his triptych Evolution, a powerful statement of Theosophical doctrine.

1912: Mondrian moved to Paris, where he first stayed in a guest room provided by the Theosophical Society.

1914: The journal of the Dutch Theosophical Society, Theosophia, rejected a long article by Mondrian on Theosophy and art.

1915: Mondrian came under the influence of independent Dutch Theosophist, and founder of Christosophy, Mathieu Hubertus Josephus Schoenmaekers.

1918: Mondrian rejected Schoenmaekers and returned to an orthodox “Blavatskyan” approach to Theosophy.

1921: Mondrian wrote to Rudolf Steiner, founder and leader of Anthroposophy, but received no answer.

(ca.) 1930: Mondrian started considering Neo-Plasticism as a new world spirituality superseding a ll religions and spiritual paths, including Theosophy.

1932: Mondrian’s application to join Freemasonry was rejected.

1938: Mondrian moved to London and asked his membership in the Theosophical Society to be transferred to the British branch.

1940: Mondrian moved to New York, where he stopped being active in the Theosophical Society.

1941 (April 12): Mondrian met in New York Charmion von Wiegand, with whom he would start a spiritual, personal, and artistic relationship.

1942: With the help of von Wiegand, Mondrian started working at Victory Boogie Woogie, his last masterpiece and a summary of his mature ideas.

1944 (February 1): Mondrian died in New York.

BIOGRAPHY

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) [Image at right] was one of the founders of abstract art, and a painter of immense influence on the whole twentieth century modernistic art movement. He was a member of the Theosophical Society for most of his adult life, although in later years he came to regard his own brand of art, Neo-Plasticism, as a new global spirituality superseding all religions and spiritual schools, including Theosophy.

Dutch historian Carel Blotkamp argued that Mondrian is best understood as a man of the Belle Époque. In 1919, he wrote to a Dutch friend from Paris sharing his enthusiasm for the book Comment on devient fée (How to Become a Fairy) by French Rosicrucian novelist Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918). “You will find much of me in this work, Mondrian wrote; he takes inspiration from the same ancient sources (occult)” (Blotkamp 1984:14). It would be difficult to find a book more representative of late nineteenth century occultism, which by 1919 was largely perceived as outdated, but not by Mondrian.

Mondrian was born in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, on March 7, 1972 in a family of art teachers who subscribed to a strict variety of Calvinism. The painter’s first contacts with occultism and Theosophy occurred when he was a student at the Amsterdam’s Academy of Fine Arts between 1892 and 1897. Among Mondrian’s fellow pupils was Karel de Bazel (1864-1932), who went on to become a leading Dutch architect. De Bazel joined the Theosophical Society in 1894. In 1896, he became a founding member of its Vahana Lodge in Amsterdam, together with fellow architects Johannes Ludovicus Mathieu Lauweriks (1864-1932) and Hermanus Johannes Maria Walenkamp (1871-1933). Another prominent Dutch architect, Michiel Brinkman (1873-1925), became the chairperson of the Rotterdam Lodge in 1903 (Lambla 1999:8-9).

According to Mondrian’s friend Albert van den Briel (1881-1971), the painter experienced around the year 1900 a religious crisis that led him to abandon the Calvinist Protestantism of his parents. He studied with great interest the doctrines of Theosophy and of the book The Great Initiates written by French Theosophist Édouard Schuré (1841-1929), to which he continued to refer throughout his life (Seuphor 1956:53-54). Under the influence of a fellow painter, Cornelis Spoor (1867-1928), Mondrian in 1909 both manifested “a sudden interest in yoga” (Bax 1995:292) and finally decided to become a member of the Theosophical Society. He formally joined it on May 14, 1909 (Bax 2006:547).

Mondrian referred in his correspondence and notebooks to several of his paintings as related to Theosophy. They included theearly Devotion (1908), which depicts a girl’s spiritual awakening, and the 1911 triptych Evolution. Mondrian scholar Robert P. Welsh (1932-2000) found religious influences already at work in an early painting, Passion Flower, [Image at right] commonly dated 1908 but in fact, according to Welsh, painted in or around 1901. Although similar in style to Evolution, Passion Flower does not yet allude to Theosophy but to a Christian mysticism and symbolism. Welsh finds in Passion Flower a “still basically ethical or Christian content,” perhaps with a moralistic element, as the painter had heard thathis model had been “infected with venereal disease” (Welsh 1987:167).

Welsh also suggested that the triptych Evolution [Image at right] should be read in a sequence going from left to right and then to the centre, depicting the three stages of the Theosophical enlightenment (Welsh 1971:47-49).

In 1912, when Mondrian arrived in Paris, where he would read Cubism through Theosophical lenses, before moving to his own studio he decided to stay in a guest room at the headquarters of the French Theosophical Society (Blotkamp 1994:59). When he returned to the Netherlands, Mondrian kept a portrait of Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), co-founder of the Theosophical Society, hung on the wall of his studio in Laren (Seuphor 1956:57).

Mondrian’s theoretical writings are impossible to understand without considering their roots in Theosophy. The earliest effort to present his ideas on abstract art was a long article on Theosophy and art written in 1913-1914 and intended for the Dutch Theosophical journal Theosophia. The text was rejected as too complicated and has unfortunately been lost, but we know something of its content from two sketchbooks compiled in Paris in the same years. Here, we see that for Mondrian Theosophy could help reduce art to “great generalities,” colors and lines, capturing the essential beyond any representation or symbolism (Welsh and Joosten 1969).

Mondrian’s ideas were already grounded in Theosophy before he met, in 1914 or 1915, the controversial Dutch esoteric author Mathieu Hubertus Josephus Schoenmaekers (1875-1944), a former Catholic priest and Theosophist who had developed his own esoteric system known as Christosophy. Hans Ludwig Cohn Jaffé (1915-1984) insisted on Schoenmaekers’s crucial influence on the development of Mondrian’s mature worldview and art, and on the foundation in 1917 of the movement and journal De Stijl. The very term “Nieuwe Beelding’” translated into English as “Neo-Plasticism’” was coined in 1916 by Schoenmaekers (Jaffé 1956). In 1916, van Doesburg described Mondrian as “obsessed by the theories of Dr. Schoenmaekers” (Blotkamp 1994:111), but the obsession was short-lived. By 1918, the artist came to refer to Schoenmaekers as an “awful man” and to conclude that, if the former priest wrote anything valuable, he derived it from Blavatsky (Blotkamp 1994:111). She taught, Mondrian argued, that cosmic harmony, truth, and beauty were one. They might be reduced to two simple elements, one male, vertical, represented by the line, and one female, horizontal, represented by color and background (Bax 2006:234-39).

Theosophy was one among different elements that lead to Mondrian’s move from symbolism to abstract art, to his theorization of Neo-Plasticism, and to his co-operation and later break, in 1924-1925, with van Doesburg. This break is normally attributed to van Doesburg’s insistence in using diagonal lines, rather than simply horizontal and vertical, as Mondrian recommended. In fact, there was more. Although sympathetic to Theosophy, van Doesburg was not a member of the Theosophical Society. In the 1920s, he gradually came to criticize Mondrian’s “rigid” Theosophy (Blotkamp 1994:192) and what he saw as his friend’s increasing transformation of Neo-Plasticism from an artistic movement into a religion.

Michel Seuphor (1901-1999) argued that Mondrian’s religion went from Calvinism to Theosophyand from Theosophy to Neo-Plasticism, which “absorbed” Theosophy and became a global spiritual worldview (Seuphor 1956:58). In fact, Mondrian saw Neo-Plasticism, particularly after his debates with the Dutch philosopher Louis Hoyack (1893-1967) in the 1930s, as a millenarian project for transforming the whole of society. He believed that, just as the Neo-Plastic way of painting had disposed of the old art and created an entirely new one, so Neo-Plasticism would end up destroying the old forms of state, Church, and family and creating new, simpler and better ones. Correctly read, his paintings were a manifesto for this brave new world. “The rectangular plane of varying dimensions and colors, Mondrian wrote, visibly demonstrates that internationalism does not mean chaos ruled by monotony, but an ordered and clearly divided unity” (Mondrian 1986:268). [Image at right]

Most Theosophists rejected these utopian ideas and did not fully understand Mondrian’s art. He came to the conclusion that the powers that be in the Theosophical Society were “always against my work.” His utopian vision of global reform had something in common with certain trends in Freemasonry. Yet, in 1932 he wrote to Hoyack that his request to become a Freemason had not even been considered (Blotkamp 1994:16).

Painful as they were, these rejections did not lead Mondrian to a break with Theosophy. When he moved to London in 1938, he duly asked the Theosophical Society to transfer his name to the local branch (Blotkamp 1994:16). It is also significant that in London his best friend was the painter Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981), a Christian Scientist. Although obviously different from Theosophy, the metaphysical Christianity of Christian Science did interest many Theosophists.

According to American painter Charmion von Wiegand (1896-1983), after he moved to New York in 1940 Mondrian was no longer active in the Theosophical Society. In fact, he “had gone beyond organizations or groups […]. To him, they represented limitations, a division in the total unity he sought to achieve.” Yet, von Wiegand maintained, he had not denied Theosophy but had made it “implicit to his life” (Rowell 1971:77).

Charmion von Wiegand is a very reliable source on Mondrian’s American years. Although her personal papers remain so far unavailable to scholars, those who knew her reported that she was more than a friend to the Dutch painter. Von Wiegand first met him on April 12, 1941 in New York (Hersh 1998:228) and started a close personal and artistic relationship that lasted until Mondrian’s death on February 1, 1944. Von Wiegand came from a family of Theosophists, and later became a pupil of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949), although she described herself at the same time as a Marxist. After Mondrian’s death, she became an important figure in New York’s Tibetan Buddhist scene (Introvigne 2014).

Mondrian also believed himself to be an “old soul,” i.e. in Theosophical jargon to have been “ reincarnated many times” (Rowell 1971:,80-81). Theosophy teaches that old souls are often misunderstood by their contemporaries. Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism was not appreciated by these Theosophists who believed that a Theosophical art should explicitly include Theosophical symbols or rely on “thought-forms,” i.e. shapes and colors of thoughts and feelings perceived by clairvoyant Theosophists and described by Theosophical leaders Annie Besant (1847-1933) and Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854-1934: Besant and Leadbeater 1905). For many Theosophists, this was Theosophical art. For Mondrian, it was not (Blotkamp 1986:98): pure Theosophical art was indeed Neo-Plasticism.

Early interpreters insisted that Theosophy did not play a significant role for Mondrian. As late as 1990, Yve-Alain Bois wrote that happily “the theosophical nonsense with which the artist’s mind was momentarily encumbered” disappeared quite rapidly from his art (Bois 1990:247-48). This was not, however, Mondrian’s own position. In 1918, he wrote to Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931): “I got everything from The Secret Doctrine ” (Blotkamp 1994:13), referring to a book written by Blavatsky. In 1921, in a letter to the founder of the Anthroposophical Society, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), Mondrian argued that his own brand of art, Neo-Plasticism, was “the art of the foreseeable future for all true Anthroposophists and Theosophists.” Disappointed at not having heard back from Steiner, Mondrian insisted in another letter to van Doesburg, in 1922, that “it is Neo-Plasticism that exemplifies Theosophical art (in the true sense of the world)” (Blotkamp 1994:182).

As mentioned earlier, this opinion was not shared by the leadership of the Theosophical Society in theNetherlands, which led Mondrian to the persuasion that Neo-Plasticism went in fact beyond Theosophy and was capable of offering to the world a new religion. There is no reason, however, not to take Mondrian seriously when he repeatedly stated that Theosophy inspired him in his quest for a reduction of the universe to its primary components, horizontal and vertical straight lines and colors. [Image at right] Accordingly, it is also fair to state that, through Mondrian, the Theosophical Society greatly contributed to the birth of modern abstract art.

IMAGES**
All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1 : Piet Mondrian.
Image #2: Piet Mondrian, The Passion Flower (1901)
Image #3 : Piet Mondrian, Evolution (1911).
Image #4: Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black (1921).
Image #5: Piet Mondrian, Victory Boogie Woogie (unfinished, 1942-1944).

REFERENCES

Bax, Marti. 2006. Het Web der Schlepping. Theosofie en Kunst in Nederland van Lauweriks tot Mondriaan. Amsterdam: Sun.

Bax, Marti. 1995. “Theosophie und Kunst in den Niederlanden 1880-1915.” Pp. 282-320 in Okkultismus und Avantgarde: von Munch bis Mondrian 1900-1915. Ostfildern: Tertium.

Besant, Annie and Charles Webster Leadbeater. 1905. Thought-Forms. London: The Theosophical Publishing House.

Blotkamp, Carel. 1994. Mondrian: The Art of Destruction. London: Reaktion Books.

Blotkamp, Carel. 1986. “Annunciation of the New Mysticism: Dutch Symbolism and Early Abstraction.” Pp. 89-111 in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, edited by Maurice Tuchman. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Bois, Yve-Alain. 1990. Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.

Hersh, Jennifer Newton. 1998. “Abstraction, Spiritualism, and Social Justice: The Art and Writing of Charmion von Wiegand.” Ph.D. Dissertation. New York: City University of New York.

Introvigne, Massimo. 2014. “From Mondrian to Charmion von Wiegand: Neoplasticism, Theosophy and Buddhism.” Pp. 49-61 in Black Mirror 0: Territory, edited by Judith Noble, Dominic Shepherd and Robert Ansell. London: Fulgur Esoterica.

Jaffé, Hans Ludwig Cohn. 1956. De Stijl 1917-1931: The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art. London: Alec Tiranti.

Lambla, Kenneth. 1999. “Abstraction and Theosophy: Social Housing in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.” Architronic 8:1. Accessed from http://architronic.saed.kent.edu/v8n1/v8n104.pdf on 24 December 2016.

Mondrian, Piet. 1986. The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian. Edited by Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James. Boston: G.K. Hall.

Rowell, Margit. 1971. “Interview with Charmion von Wiegand.” Pp. 77-86 in Piet Mondrian 1872-1944: Centennial Exhibition. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Seuphor, Michel. 1956. Piet Mondrian: Life and Work. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Welsh, Robert P. 1987. “Mondrian and Theosophy.” Pp. 163-84 in The Spiritual Image in Modern Art, edited by Kathleen J. Regier. Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Publishing House.

Welsh, Robert P. 1971. “Mondrian and Theosophy.” Pp. 35-51 in Piet Mondrian 1872-1944: Centennial Exhibition. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Welsh, Robert P. and J.M. Joosten, 1969. Two Mondrian Sketchbooks, 1912-1914. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff International.

Post Date:
26 December 2016

Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona

FERENZONA TIMELINE

1879 (September 24): Raoul Ferenzona was born in Florence, Italy.

1880 (April 19): Ferenzona’s father, a controversial political journalist who wrote under the pseudonym “Giovanni Antonio Dal Molin,” was assassinated in Livorno. Raoul would later change his last name to “Dal Molin Ferenzona” to honor his father.

1890 (ca): Ferenzona was enrolled in a military college in Florence and subsequently in the Military Academy in Modena.

1899: Ferenzona published in Modena his first book: Primulae – novelle gentili (Primulas – Gentle Tales), a collection of tales.

1900: Ferenzona made his first artistic apprenticeship in Palermo under the guidance of the sculptor Ettore Ximenes.

1901: Ferenzona was admitted to the Art Academy in Florence, renowned at that time for its nude art classes.

1902: Ferenzona travelled to Monaco, where he became influenced by the works of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein. In Rome, he was introduced to sculptor Gustavo Prini and his circle.

1906: Ferenzona travelled to London, Paris, The Hague, and Brussels.

1908: Ferenzona’s closest friends, Domenico Baccarini and the poet Sergio Corazzini, both died from tuberculosis.

1911: Ferenzona travelled through Prague, Graz, Brünn, and Seis am Schlern.

1912: Ferenzona published Ghirlanda di stelle (Garland of Stars). He had two art exhibitions together with Frank Brangwyn in Vienna, Austria, and Brünn, Moravia.

1917: Ferenzona attended meetings and events organised by the splinter Theosophical group “Il Roma” at the Theosophical League headquarters.

1918: While he was staying in Bern, Ferenzona underwent a spiritual crisis. He left Switzerland and was sheltered in Santa Francesca Romana monastery in Rome.

1919: Ferenzona published Zodiacale – Opera religiosa. Orazioni, acqueforti e aure (Zodiac – A Religious Work. Orations, Copper Engravings, and Auras).

1921: Ferenzona published Vita di Maria: Opera mistica (Life of Mary: A Mystic Work).

1923: Ferenzona published AôB – Enchiridion Notturno. Dodici miraggi nomadi, dodici punte di diamante originali. Misteri rosacrociani n. 2 (AôB – Nocturnal Enchiridion: Twelve Nomadic Mirages, Twelve Original Engravings, Rosicrucian Mysteries no. 2).

1926: Ferenzona published a collection of poems and lithographies, presented as three “essays:” Uriel, torcia di Dio – Saggi di riflessione illuminata (Uriel, Torch of God – Essays of Illuminated Reflection); Élèh – Saggi di riflessioni illuminata (Élèh – Essays of Illuminated Reflection); Caritas ligans – saggi di riflessione illuminata (Caritas Ligans – Essays of Illuminated Reflection).

1927: Ferenzona took part in the Second International Exhibition of Engravings in Florence.

1929: Ferenzona had a solo art exhibition in Florence at Galleria Bellenghi, and some of his works were exhibited in Rome at the Mostra del Libro Moderno Italiano (Modern Italian Books Exhibition). He also published Ave Maria! Un poema ed un’opera originale con fregi di Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona. Misteri Rosacrociani (Opera 6.a) (Hail Mary! A poem and an original work with Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona’s friezes, Rosicrucian Mysteries, work no. 6).

1931: Ferenzona exhibited at the Salon International du Livre d’Art in Paris.

1945: Ferenzona illustrated the collection of poems by Paul Verlaine, L’Amour et le Bonheur.

1946 (January 19): Ferenzona died in Milan.

BIOGRAPHY

Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona (1879-1946) [Image at right] was a prolific and multifaceted artist. He was a renowned painter, illustrator, and engraver/printmaker; he was part of the Art Nouveau movement. Although he used to call himself a “Pre-Raphaelite,” in fact Ferenzona’s work was more deeply influenced by Belgian and Czech Symbolism. Ferenzona was also an influential proponent of Theosophical and Rosicrucian ideas in the twentieth century artistic, literary and occult milieu.

Unfairly regarded as a minor painter and illustrator, he was rediscovered by critics in the 1970s (Quesada 1978, 1979) and hailed as one of the most creative and multifaceted Italian artists of the first half of the twentieth century. The famous Italian painter Gino Severini (1883-1966) in his autobiography described him as “an extremely lively, clever, little young man with French style moustaches. He defined himself a Pre-Raphaelite painter and did not want to hear the very word Impressionism […] Surrealism could have been his field” (Severini 1983:20).

Ferenzona was born in Florence, Italy, on September 24, 1879, to Olga Borghini and Giovanni Gino Ferenzona. The latter was a news correspondent for the national Italian daily Gazzetta d’Italia in Livorno. He wrote several articles, and a couple of novels, against Italian revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) under the pseudonym of Giovanni Antonio Dal Molin. Ferenzona Sr. was murdered on April 19, 1880 by a partisan of Garibaldi. Raoul was left orphan at age one, and moved to Florence together his mother and his brother, Fergan. Later, Ferenzona Jr. would add “Dal Molin” to his last name in honour of his assassinated father.

Raoul started a military career by enrolling first in a military college in Florence and then at the Military Academy in Modena. During the summer holidays, he wrote his first book, Primulae (novelle gentili). This is a collection of six short stories where, apart from mythical creatures, decadent characters, and dark cruel atmospheres, we find several autobiographical elements. One of the tales (“Somnia Animae”) has as a protagonist, Mario. He is a painter living in an attic and unable to truly love a real woman because he is in love with a figure of Judith portrayed in one of his paintings. It is amazing how the character of the painter closely resembles Ferenzona as he would become as an adult. The story also shows how important and prominent female figures and portraits were in his work.

More interested in the arts than in his military education and career, Ferenzona moved to Palermo in 1900 to pursue an apprenticeship under the well-known sculptor Ettore Ximenes (1855-1926). It lasted only a few months however, because Ximenes advised Ferenzona to pursue his studies on his own. Therefore, in 1901, Ferenzona moved to Florence and was admitted to the Art Academy. Here, he became roommate and friend of Domenico Baccarini (1882-1907), a native of Faenza and a promising young painter and sculptor. Both the friendship with Baccarini and the resulting connection with the cultural scene of Faenza were an important step in Raoul’s artistic and spiritual path.

In 1902, Ferenzona travelled to Munich. From then on, he dedicated himself primarily to graphic arts and painting. In Munich, the work of Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543) and Albrecht Dürer (1471-1523) introduced Ferenzona to a new conception of art (Bardazzi 2002:12). The impact of Dürer on Ferenzona’s work was crucial, specifically for what concerned the use of certain printmaking techniques. Knowing that Dürer’s etchings represented or constituted part of an alchemical process (Calvesi 1993:34-38; Roob 2011:411, 430) exerted an immense fascination on the young Ferenzona and his work.

In 1904, Ferenzona moved to Rome with his friend Baccarini. In the Italian capital, they were both introduced to the circle of the sculptor Giovanni Prini (1877-1958). The circle included Italian artists who were at that time part of the movement known as Divisionism, including Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), and Gino Severini, as well as by representatives of Art Nouveau and Cubo-Futurism such as Duilio Cambellotti (1876-1960) and Arturo Ciacelli (1883-1966). Severini tells us that Ferenzona often quarrelled with Boccioni and Balla (Severini 1983:23) because of his Pre-Raphaelite conception of art (i.e. the primacy of dream, myth, and imagination over the inner world of the artist). This latter had a central role in French Impressionism, a movement that Ferenzona despised. In the same year, in Rome, Ferenzona also became friends with the poet Sergio Corazzini (1886-1907), and they collaborated in the journal Cronache latine.

In 1906, Ferenzona travelled through Europe, visiting Paris, London, Bruges, and The Hague. He tried to follow an ideal spiritual path and in the steps of his favourite Symbolist authors and artists: Félicien Rops (1833-1898), Robert Ensor (1877-1958), Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), Marcel Lenoir (1872-1931), Carlos Schwabe (1866-1926), Jean Delville (1867-1953), Jan Toorop (1858-1928), Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), René Laforgue (1894-1962), Francis Jammes (1868-1938), Albert Samain (1858-1900), and Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898). It is not a coincidence that most of these artists were interested in Rosicrucian movements and took part to Les Salons de la Rose+Croix (Pincus-Witten 1976:110-15) organised by Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918). Some were also members of the Theosophical Society. The overwhelming influence of Toorop on Ferenzona’s work is self-evident [Image at right]. The representation of the eternal feminine is recurring in Ferenzona’s paintings and engravings, and assumed both a Symbolist connotation and certain spiritual and esoteric meanings during the first decade of the twentieth century.

In 1907, Ferenzona lost both of his best friends: Domenico Baccarini and Sergio Corazzini. Both died from tuberculosis. In 1912, Ferenzona travelled again through Seis am Schlern, Klagenfurt, Graz, Prague, and Brünn, and in the same year he published Ghirlanda di stelle (Garland of Stars). The book, dedicated to his deceased friends, is both a collection of poems and an account of his past travels and experiences. Ghirlanda di stelle attests to a remarkable change in Ferenzona’s narrative style, both in visual arts and poetry. Poems, drawings, and engravings became part of the same narration. A new kind of narrative was emerging from Ferenzona’s work: rather than books of art, he wanted to produce an “art of the book.”

Between 1910 and 1912, Ferenzona visited several cities in Central and Eastern Europe, and also exhibited his works in Vienna and Moravia together with paintings by the British artist Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) (Bardazzi 2002:81). Exactly in the same time period, the Czech painter Josef Váchal (1884-1969) together with Jan Konůpek (1883-1950), František Kobliha (1877-1962), and Jan Zrzavý (1890-1977), founded the Sursum group, involved in both artistic and spiritual and occult activities (Introvigne 2017; Larvovà 1996). Váchal, who was obsessed with the figure of Satan (Introvigne 2016:233-34; Faxneld 2014), had dedicated his first series of watercolours to the Devil (Bardazzi 2002:15).

Even if Ferenzona’s stay in Prague in 1911 is well-documented (Ferenzona 1912:186-189), it is hard to prove that he got in touch with Váchal or any other member of the Sursum group there. Nonetheless, Italian art historian Emanuele Bardazzi observed that Ferenzona’s work “Gaspard de la nuit,” [Image at right] presumably referring to the protagonist of the novel of the same title by Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841), shows a strong influence of Vachal’s style (Bardazzi 2002:15-16).

In 1917, Ferenzona was in Rome, where his interest in the occult and Rosicrucianism flourished. He reportedly joined the circle of followers of the Italian esoteric master Giuliano Kremmerz (1861-1930) (Quesada 1979:19), but he was mostly active in Rosicrucian and Theosophical milieus. Ferenzona was invited in 1909 and 1910 to lecture on German Theosophist, and future founder of the Anthroposophical Society, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) (Bardazzi 2002:81), but it was between 1917 and 1923 that Raoul fully expressed his “occult” potential. In July 1917, Ferenzona exhibited eighty works together with some illustrations of American painter Elihu Wedder (1836-1923), at the headquarters in Via Gregoriana, Rome, of the Theosophical League, a splinter Italian group led by Decio Calvari (1863-1937) that had separated from the Theosophical Society. He also gave a lecture on “Apparizioni artistiche relative e concordanze supreme” (“Artistic relative appearances and supreme concordances”). Ferenzona started the lecture by arguing how particularly gifted artists have a natural attitude towards occult disciplines, followed by a critical analysis of artists who dabbled in the occult, such as William Blake (1757-1827), Elihu Wedder, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), and many others. Ferenzona argued that a peculiar trait identified this kind of gifted artist, the presence of the “artistic appearance.” This is defined as “a magical fact resulting from all the combined (known and unknown) forces of the Cosmos that operate through the artist” (Ferenzona 1917:40). Ferenzona also gave another lecture in Rome in August 1918 on the origins of artistic inspiration. In the effort of tracing back to primordial civilisations the source of inspiration, Ferenzona introduced elements evidently inspired by Steiner’s Occult Science (Ferenzona 1918:40).

At the meetings of the Theosophical League, Ferenzona also made the acquaintance of another well-known figure of twentieth century Italian occultism (Evola 1963:28), Julius Evola (1898-1974). They would share both artistic and occultist experiences. In the early 1920s, together with Evola, Ferenzona joined Arturo Ciacelli (whose acquaintance Ferenzona had already made in Prini’s house) and his circle, “Cenacolo d’arte dell’Augusteo” (Art Circle of the Augusteum) (Olzi 2016:24-25). Amongst the activities of Ciacelli’s circle, there were an exhibition of Ferenzona’s paintings, a declamation of Evola’s poems, and a dance performance in the style of Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, which was connected with the artistic movement Dadaism that Evola was part of at the time (Paoletti 2009:40-48).

The experiences he shared with Evola in both the modernist art and Theosophical fields changed (although temporarily) his vision of art and spirituality. Amongst the works of his early thirties, Ferenzona produced a series of paintings of Zodiac signs and Cosmos, which could be seen as the result of this experimental and temporary phase [Image at right]. In 1918, during a brief stay in Switzerland (first in Zurich then in Bern), Ferenzona suffered from a “spiritual crisis” that lead him to seek asylum in the Catholic monastery of Santa Francesca Romana in Rome. This event influenced the style of his successive works, as well as their conception.

Ferenzona’s popularity was not limited to Theosophical or modernist milieus. In November 1919, he started giving lectures every Wednesday, in the shape of an “Esoteric Course of History of Art and Spiritual Science,” in a studio in Via Margutta, in Rome. It is also attested that Ferenzona lectured on the same topics in other cities apart from Rome. In a letter dated April 12, 1919, Ferenzona accepted the invitation of Lamberto Caffarelli (1880-1963), a composer who was a member both of the Anthroposophical Society (Beraldo 2013:421-54) and of the Italian Gnostic Church (Olzi 2014:14-27), to give a lecture in Faenza. Attached to this letter, there was a programme with the titles of all lectures from his “Esoteric Course” held in Rome. Amongst the titles, one in particular draws attention: “I Rosa-Croce (1300/1910)” (The Rosicrucians, 1300-1910). Although the text of this lecture has not been found, in the correspondence between Ferenzona and Caffarelli there are several references to Rosicrucianism. In another letter sent to Caffarelli, Ferenzona first quoted a famous Rosicrucian book that was published in Paris in 1623 (Naudé 1623:27) and then proposed to create a new Rosicrucian brotherhood in Italy. According to Ferenzona, the most suitable place for the meetings of this brotherhood would have been the convent of Santa Croce of Fonte Avellana, near Potenza (Ferenzona 1920:5).

The project of the new Rosicrucian community never materialized, but Ferenzona’s lecture documents his occult interests at that time. Although Ferenzona was interested in all the artists and authors that took part in the Salons de la Rose+Croix, he admitted in a letter to Caffarelli (Ferenzona 1920:9) that he never had the chance to find a copy of Constitutiones Rosae Crucis et Spiritus Sancti Ordinis edited by Péladan, and as a consequence did not really know how the Rosicrucian order at work behind the Salons operated (Fagiolo 1974:129-36). At the very beginning of the same letter, Ferenzona stated that a “Rosicrucian should be sufficient unto himself.” This statement was not an apology for arrogance, but referred to a self-initiation independent of any organized structure or order. From the early 1920s, Ferenzona started naming and considering his illustrated books as “Rosicrucian Mysteries” and tools for self-initiation.

One of these “Mysteries” was conceived and published in the period Ferenzona spent “in-between Bern and Rome” at the end of World War I. In 1919, Ferenzona published Zodiacale – Opera Religiosa (Zodiacal: A Religious Book), a “book dedicated to God” whose content was a collection of twelve prayers, twelve copper engravings, and twelve tales. The number twelve had two meanings: twelve are the signs of the Zodiac, and twelve is a multiple of four, the number of the conditions to access the truth in the most renowned treatise written by French esoteric master Éliphas Lévi (1810-1875) – “to know, to dare, to will, to remain silent” (Lévi 1861:110). These “four words of truth” serve as the conclusion of Zodiacale. The book includes twelve sections. Each section is introduced by a prayer (a brief poem), a copper engraving, and a tale. These narrative pieces are surreal tales populated by magicians, mad painters, enchanted puppets, alchemists, and psychics engaged in bizarre adventures. Zodiacale is both a magical and alchemical book. “The art of the book” of Ghirlanda di stelle becomes here the activation of an alchemical process. Each character in the book is a facet of the author’s self, and every engraving [Image at right] is a further step in a process of transformation. Like Dürer, Ferenzona proposes an opus alchemicum through his engravings. Through the cycle of the twelve zodiac signs, and through the poems and tales, both the author and the audience are invited to transcend themselves. Both Caffarelli and Evola received copies of this magical book from Ferenzona.

In 1923, Ferenzona published another book that included twelve engravings and twelve poems, AôB – Enchiridion Notturno. Dodici miraggi nomadi, dodici punte di diamante originali. Misteri rosacrociani n. 2 (AôB – Nocturnal Enchiridion: Twelve Nomadic Mirages, Twelve Original Engravings. Rosicrucian Mysteries, no. 2). As stressed in the title, this is the second of “Rosicrucian Mysteries” dedicated to Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849). Poems and engravings [Image at right] work as initiatory tools that reveal the secret nature of magic.

Besides the Rosicrucian Mysteries, in 1926 Ferenzona carried on a side project with a series of three “essays of illuminated reflection,” These are Uriel, torcia di Dio (Uriel, Torch of God ), Élèh (Élèh), and Caritas Ligans (Caritas Ligans), three collections of poems and lithographies. The images are strongly influenced by the artistic movements known as Cubo-Futurism. Although the poems are dedicated to figures of the Jewish-Christian tradition, the influence of Theosophy is apparent in all three books.

In 1927, Ferenzona was one of the artists exhibiting at the Second International Exhibition of Engravings in Florence. The event was organised by art critic Vittorio Pica (1864-1930) and writer Aniceto Del Massa (1898-1975). Del Massa wrote several articles under the pseudonym of “Sagittario” (Sagittarius) (Del Ponte 1994:181) for the occult journal Ur edited by Arturo Reghini (1878- 1946) and Julius Evola. Del Massa was also a member of the occult-initiatory group of the same name connected with the periodical, “Il Gruppo di Ur” (The Ur Group). Coming back to Rosicrucian works, Ferenzona in 1921 and in 1929 published respectively Vita di Maria. Opera mistica (Life of Mary A Mystic work) and Ave Maria! Un poema ed un’opera originale con fregi di Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona. Misteri Rosacrociani (Opera 6.a) (Hail Mary! A poem and an original work with Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona’s friezes, Rosicrucian Mysteries, Work no. 6). Both of these books were collections of poems and images. Besides recurrent references to Medieval mysticism and Rosicrucianism, the importance and the role of femininity in these books is crucial [Image at right].

In the 1940s, Ferenzona illustrated several Italian classics, from Inni sacri (Sacred Hymns) by Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) to Idilli (Idylls) by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). However, the illustrations realised for L’Amour et le Bonheur, a collection of poems by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), deserve a mention for their spiritual and esoteric meaning. An image that effectively expressed the conception of transcendence and spiritual realisation was his alleged self-portrait [Image at right]. It could be connected to the final sentences that seal the end of the book Zodiacale: “A NEW MAN […] A new religious man who is a lover of life and death, of natural and spiritual science, freed from desire, wise and manly, good, he uttered out loud to the four direction of the new Era the four action: to know – to dare – to will – to remain silent. And finally, this kind of authentic Christian was praised by the Almighty” (Ferenzona 1919:141). These words may perhaps serve as an epitaph for Ferenzona, who always regarded himself as a Christian esotericist. He died in Milan on January 19, 1946.

IMAGES**
** All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Ferenzona, Autoritratto a pastello (1913).
Image #2: Ferenzona, Image d’autrefois (1909).
Image #3: Ferenzona, Gaspard de la nuit (1920).
Image #4: Ferenzona, Zodiaco (ca. 1930).
Image #5: Ferenzona, Scorpione, acquaforte per Zodiacale (1918).
Image #6: Ferenzona, A ô b Enchiridion notturno (1923).
Image #7: Ferenzona, frontispiece for Vita di Maria (1921).
Image #8: Ferenzona, illustration (possible self-portrait) for Verlaine’s L’Amour et le Bonheur (1945).

REFERENCES

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Post Date:
3 March 2017